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Pontifical Mass in Moscow, Russia

Rorate has received the following announcement from Oleg Michael Martynov of Una Voce Russia:

Una Voce Russia gladly reports that Mgr. Athanasius Schneider, the auxiliary bishop of Maria Santissima in Astana (Kazakhstan), will visit Moscow and celebrate a Holy Mass in the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite (usus antiquior) there. The Mass will start on Saturday, October 15, at 9:00 AM in the historic church of St. Louis (12a Malaya Lubyanka Str.), Moscow's only and one of Russia's two Catholic churches that have never been closed during the Soviet era. It was there that, in 1926, Mgr. Pie Eugène Neveu was clandestinely consecrated bishop and appointed apostolic administrator of Moscow in an attempt to restore the Catholic hierarchy in Russia virtually exterminated by the Bolsheviks.

Commemorating the half-jubilee dates of Bishop Neveu's consecration (1926), banishment from Soviet Russia (1936) and decease (1946), Una Voce Russia with the support of the Archdiocese of Mother of God in Moscow is holding an international conference of scholars on the "Catholic Church in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s" on October 15 to 17, and the Holy Mass celebrated by Mgr. Schneider will commence this three-day event.

For all matters pertaining to the conference, please contact Una Voce Russia at secretary@unavoce.ru or see the website (Russian only):

It is the first time that a bishop will be celebrating the TLM at the church of St. Louis (and possibly in all of the present Russian Federation) since perhaps 1936 and of course since 1970.

At present, in the vast country that is the Russian Federation, the TLM is offered every 2nd and 4th Sunday of the month in a chapel in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Moscow, and every 3rd Sunday in a chapel in St. Petersburg. The SSPX also maintains a monthly Mass (every 3rd Sunday) in Moscow.

7 comments:

Gratias
said...

Una Voce is a great grass-roots organization. Russia suffered so much under Communism. Starting with an apparently innocuous atheistic Dialectic Materialism Karl Marx initiated a movement that caused over 100 million deaths. The Devil still uses Marxism as a tool to spread misery around the world. The restoration of our unchanging values with Summorum Pontificum is of profound philosophical significance.

it's french theme i bet is because the original (as in modern times original) latin-rite catholics in russia were 19th francophiles, with a healthy intellectual base in the upper middle class and nobility (russian nobility for the longest time spoke french as a first language like other european courts)

francophilia was also a cornerstone in the foundation of modern catholicism in slavic bulgaria too

Russia is historically Byzantine territory but this doesn't change the fact that Russia had -- and has -- Catholics of the Latin Rite who are NOT foreigners, but who are just as Russian as their Russian Orthodox and Russian Greek Catholic countrymen.

How would you feel if the "Latin Rite" character of Western Europe and North America were to be invoked to justify a ban on the Eastern Rite in those places?

No, russian nobility couldn't attend any catholic parish in Russia during XIX century. A conversion form Russian Orthodoxy into any other confession was prohibited under penal code of Russian empire. So the converts were either to be the clandestine catholics or to leave Russia for ever (as for example Servant of God fr. Demetrius Gollitzyn). Latin-rite catholics in Russia were the foreigners or the polish ones whose homeland was occupied by Russia.

The church of St. Luois was built by french emigrees in 1791 and it's first pastor who wasn't of French origin was fr. Leopold Brown (1936-45).